Floating Content research has been performed in the Future Internet program, in phases 2 and 3 of the program (2009-2012). The activity has been a collaboration between University of Helsinki (Jussi Kangasharju) and Aalto University (Jörg Ott, Esa Hyytiä, Pasi Lassila, and Jorma Virtamo). Even though the Future Internet program is ending, we are still pursuing the collaboration by extending the work done in the program.

People are increasingly using online social networks for maintaining contact with friends and colleagues irrespective of their physical location. While such services are essential to overcome distances, using infrastructure services for location-based services may not be desirable, for example for privacy reasons.

In the floating content work, we have designed and analyzed a fully distributed variant of an ephemeral content sharing service, solely dependent on the mobile devices in the vicinity using principles of opportunistic networking. The result is a best effort service for floating content in which content is created locally, its availability is geographically limited and its lifetime and spreading depends on interested nodes being available.

Although similar contents have been “floating” around already for the past 10, even 15 years, what sets our work apart from existing work is that we have very thoroughly analyzed the feasibility of floating content and identified the effects of a variety of system parameters on the performance of the system. Our work covers both mathematical modeling, simulated experiments with real-world mobility traces, real-world measurements, and prototype implementation. This approach has served us well and has enabled us to research many interesting aspects of the floating content problem space.

The results have been published in the following 4 papers, 3 at a top-level networking or pervasive computing conference, and 1 in a top-level pervasive computing journal.